I've been watching a lot of Guitar pedals videos on youtube, Mainly the most awesome JHS Pedal Show One of the pedals which has stood out, in numerous forms, is the Angry Charlie. This modern pedal aim to replicate the might JCM800.

It does sound a lot like my origninal JCM800 100 W amp. Nice high-Gain but not endless infinite sustain or massively fat NU-METAL single notes which can sustain whilst you go and get a burger. You have to work hard to get a hard heavy tone but what you get from it is very cool and doesn't sound very dated. The tone is really late 80s thrash - growling punky with bite and not a huge sound which takes all the frequencies for subsonic to dogwhistle pitch This is one of the reasons why the JCM800 is so desired. (Its another post for me to list all my reasons)

However, returning back to the story, I was thinking about getting this pedal but then as i looked into to more, it was based on a late 1980s marshall guv'nor pedal. I have an original english-made pedal which i bought for £20 with my JCM800 (awesome bargin at £150, thanks Dave!!). i'd used it as a booster pedal for when i neded a bit more umph with the JCM800 but this use eventually fell out of my fashion.

Reading more about the pedal, it seems a good time to return to it and it is a new beast. The pedal wasn't designed to be distortion tone, it was a full-on marshall amp simulator in box and it did this using red LEDS instead of standard silicon components. I can get an high gain angry sound by dialing in 7 on the gain and overloading the clean or crunchy channnel of a small valve amp. A low gain crunch can also be dialed in. I'm going to be experimenting to see how i can get this working well with my church pedal board.

My pedal review in bullet points Pros:

• Sounds like a low-gain Marshall
• Sounds like a cranked Marshall

Cons:

• makes every amp sound like a Marshall JCM800
• noisy
• dodgey jacks/switch
• Bizarre effects loop